I briefly looked at the previous version of the Form’s Smart Swim googles when I was in my tri-curious phase (still a little bit, but need to figure out running again before I can really do that). The Smart Swim 2 look really cool. AFAIK, they are based on the same basic technology as the ENGO glasses that I reviewed a while back. I’m sure they are awesome, DCR seems to like them. But that’s not the point of this post.

They are expensive. $249 for a set of swim googles. A decent set of Speedo goggles is ~$20. It might be worth paying the extra money for the display hardware, that’s a personal choice that I can totally understand. I have made similar choices for other products.

What I don’t understand is the high hardware cost and the high subscription cost to get basic functionality, like the open water compass. Some kind of monthly (or yearly) cost to get features like a training plan makes sense, I pay for crappy advice from a couple adaptive training platforms. That makes sense, but basic functionality doesn’t. Usually, when there’s a high hardware cost, the software cost is low. Or the other way around. If these were $100, and the yearly vig was $100, that would make more sense to me…